Description

Turrican II: The Final Fight is a platformer/shooter as typically seen on consoles, but designed for home computers from the ground up.

Its plot is - naturally - very simple: an evil mega-robot called The Machine attacks the United Planets Ship Avalon 1, slaughtering all who resist. All - except Bren McGuire, who manages to escape and slips into the experimental Turrican bionic armor. As Turrican, he strives to show The Machine who's the boss.

Unlike other games of its type, this game contains three levels of horizontal shooter action in the spirit of R-Type or the developers' own Katakis. Six large worlds are to be explored, where you are basically free to go everywhere you want, since there is no automatic scrolling and the levels are packed with hidden extra lives and weapons. All those levels are very different: the first one in the rock desert is pretty colorful with parallaxing rainbow background and happy music, while the following worlds get darker and darker.

Turrican can get some different weapons for his arm cannon:

The bounce weapon which rebounds from surfaces into smaller bouncing balls when powered up;

The laser, which can shoots beams as large as Turrican himself when maxed out;

the multiple shot beam, which can shoot up to five beams covering approximately a 90 degree angle.

The Turrican suit weaponry is not limited to the arm cannon however:

He also can fire a continuous beam, activated by holding the fire button. This beam can be rotated around Turrican, so it is possible to blast things below him in this way;

Additionally, he can fire power lines by pressing the space bar, resulting in two energy bars as high as the screen going from the Turrican suit to the left and right of the screen, severely damaging enemies in the process;

If the space bar is pressed when the hero is crouching, the Turrican will morph into a shuriken shape. In this state, it will roll to the left or the right, damaging enemies while being invincible and small bombs can be dropped by pressing the fire button;

Finally, the most powerful attack, which can only be used one time per life, can be delivered by pressing the fire button and the space bar at the same time. The Turrican suit will morph into a shuriken shape and fly around the screen for several seconds, while firing shots of the different weapons in multiple directions.

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Trivia

Exhibition riots

Factor 5 presented a Turrican II demo on a computershow in Cologne in 1991. Only 900 copies were available for the public and overwhelming demand caused riots on the show with two people wounded.

Extra points

Shoot the very first "EXIT" arrow (pointing down), it will increase your score

Graphics Amiga

Both Amiga and ST versions feature 16-colour graphics. On the Amiga the 32-bit colour mode was avoided on purpose: according to Julian Eggebrecht:

"because 32-colour mode would use up far too much memory. There'd be too much processing time to run it at 50 frames as well. Anyway, we weren't going primarily for presentation. From the start what we were aiming for was excellent gameplay, so when it came to choosing between 50 frames, parallax, animation and 32 colours, it was the colours that had the lowest priority." (Source: The One #28, 1990/12)

With this reduction of colours 50 frames per second were achieved on the Amiga.

Music

The game's music was originally written for the Amiga using the TFMX sound format - some of it actually contains 7 channels! This was actually achieved by the technique used to play tracker modules on the Atari ST, on which the channels had to be mixed by software rather than hardware like on the Amiga. The Amiga 7 channels sound routines was invented by ST music programmer Jochen Hippel and was adapted by Chris Hülsbeck for the Turrican title tune. Basically the method uses one hardware channel of the Amiga soundchip to play 4 software mixed channels, resulting in 7 independent channels.

Original version

The German ASM magazine published a review of the Amiga version in issue 1991/03. Two issues later the Commodore 64 version was reviewed as a conversion, but this is not true. In an interview with the designer Manfred Trenz he stated in ASM issue 1991/07 that the Commodore 64 version is the only original version and all other versions are conversions.

References

In one of the shoot-em-up levels (just before the vertical rocks), a heli with a "KATAKIS LIVES" banner appears, shooting it results in a nice reward.

Did you know that the alien complex in the Turrican II extro was inspired by The Book Of Alien from 1979. A sketch of comic artist Moebius.

Soundtrack

A soundtrack CD exists and, as of 2002, can be ordered via SynSONIQ Records. It contains original music from Turrican 1-3 (Amiga) and the console versions as well as the medley from Chris Hülsbeck's album Shades.